Emigre Codex

A large portable data drive that contains all the vital information for creating human clones

The Emigre Codex

Deciphered from the Spitzkoppe Archive, the Emigre Codex is the blueprint for creating human clones from only starting sample genetic material. The Codex itself is a large data drive, roughly 5 kilos in mass, and the size of a reference book. The drive has a small internal power source, and a number of access ports along it's surface. The drive can be 'opened' much like a book, with the external cover working to protect the access ports, and covering the small touch screen interface on the drive.

A virtual interface can be displayed by the data drive, and functions as a 'computer book' allowing holographic pages to be turned, and for a reader to flip through the contents of the drive. This isn't special to the Emigre Codex, but is a function of the type of data drive it is. These data drives are fairly common through the Cosmic Era, and are functionally picture books, and often are archives of Social Media activity. The 'computer book' is technologically related to the MUSE handheld device, but more media centric, and not a daily carry item.

Contents

The Emigre Codex contains three sections, how to create a zygote from even trace genetic material, how to nurture the growth of the zygote into a fully mature specimen in a relatively short amount of time, and how to summon an animating essence into the body.

While simple in explanation, the contents of the Codex are extensive. The skills and technology required for creating a human life from near scratch are impressive and expensive. The machinery needed to house and force grow a body are likewise sophisticated and challenging to create and maintain. The last part is actually the most difficult, and for most of advanced science, proved to be the undoing of cloning efforts. There is more to a human being, or any higher life form, than just the continuous operation of organs, enzymes, and muscle. The anima, the soul, the spirit, the animating essence, is required for a human clone to exist. There are three things that occur when a clone host body is grown with no soul. First, the body is nothing more than an organic machine, the host has no will, no intelligence, the proverbial the lights are on but there is no one home. The second is that the host begins to die the moment it is disconnected from the life support and gestation machinery. The third and least common option is that something 'else' animated the host body. This is thankfully rare, as the entities that can possess and animate a vessel are rarely friendly to humanity, and are generally alien in mind and appearance.

Those abominations that are born typically have to be contained and put down by Reflex teams and Fast Response Units.

Application

A sufficient sized corp could take the Emigre Codex and use it to put a cloning department in place, typically over the course of several years, and a significant investment in capital.

The Emigre Codex has given humanity the ability to create clones, Homo Sapiens Replicans, from DNA. This has fostered a number of negative things through the Cosmic Era. The lot of the clone is a dark one. In the most egalitarian nations, clones are afforded the same rights as residents, though they experience a large amount of anti-clone racism, and are treated as either second class citizens or unfortunates. In less lofty nations clones are consumable, expendable, and exploitable, and while cloning for food purposes is rare, clone slave soldiers, slave laborers, and such are common enough to be troubling.

The River of Sorrow, the metaphysical force that fuels parapsychics and damages the barriers between dimensions rises as a result of human suffering and malice. Events in the past have caused it to crest, such as the Black Death, the World Wars, and the Resource Wars. The suffering inflicted against clones and the malice behind him feed this psychotropic flow of negative energy.

The cheapening of human life has also be a side effect of the technology contained in the codex. People have few compunctions about farming clones for the purpose of harvesting their organs. They are also willing to send clone troopers on suicide missions, fresh meat for the grinder. This bleeds over quickly to not just clones but to the poor, minorities, criminals, and anyone else who hasn't risen to the middle or higher in society. The poor, the downtrodden, the weak, and the sick can suffer and bleed just like the clones.

They aren't even human. They are copies of humans. Copying a credit note doesn't make a new credit note, it makes a copy and that copy is worthless. Can't spend it, can you. Grow a thing that looks like a person in a machine, well, no different from a machine. They are just fleshy robots. Who cares how many you kill.

Plot Hooks

The Emigre Codex is a dingus, a portable item that the PCs and other interested parties want to obtain for themselves. The Codex will then be sealed away for good, destroyed, used to install a new cloning center, used to troubleshoot the cloning program of a megacorp, or be used to create weaponized soldier clones for the extermination of the enemies of the corp or state. It becomes a game of Get the Dingus First.

Historical Item - the Emigre Codex isn't new and there are copies of it around the world. Various nations and corps have their own pirated or stolen copies, and have used it to found their own cloning programs. It remains a historical item, the original at least.

Lost in Transcription - the original Emigre Codex is much larger data wise than the pirated copies. The pirated copies were stolen from the Voynich Archive in St Petersburg, Russia, and represent an annotated and abridged version of the Codex. It is functionally the Dummies Guide to Human Cloning. The original has a great deal more data that still hasn't been deciphered, and various parties are interested in obtaining the original, or a copy of it, rather than the more readily available Voynich-Emigre Codex.

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Freetext

Idea from the Aeneid. Could make an intriguing encounter when searching for firewood..."Quite near there happened to be a mound of earth, at the highest part of which were growing thickets of cornel and a dense cluster of spiky myrtle-stems. I went up there and tried to wrench the green growth from the ground to provide a leafy covering for our altar. There I was confronted by a horrible and astounding miracle. For from the first bush which I tried to break off...blood oozed in dark drops, fouling the earth with its spots...A piteous moan came from the base of the mound and I heard a human voice answering me: 'Why, Aeneas, must you rend a poor sufferer? I am buried here...for I am Polydorus. Here death overpowered me in a crop of piercing iron-pointed spears. And so a crop resembling javelins has grown over me...'"